Farthest House (4 page)

6

Willow clutched Doll in her left hand, keeping her right tucked up and out of sight. Following Julian up the front steps, she moved as slowly as she dared. White wicker tables sat in shady corners on the porch and held pots of bushy red geraniums with green asparagus ferns spilling over the sides. Six wooden rockers, each painted a different bright color, sat lined in a row. They looked empty but quivered like breath, just enough to make her unsure. She hurried and caught Papa’s hand. She still didn’t want him to leave, but the house, even with the not-for-sure-empty rocking chairs and the glass dragon, felt good.

Julian reached for the bell and hesitated. Was he really a guest? Before he decided to ring, or walk in, the front door with its thick leaded-glass panel opened. A brown and yellow dog, its long hair sweeping from side to side, sprung out at them. Willow let out a cry and hugged Julian’s waist.

Twisting around Papa and away from the animal sniffing at her face, she first saw the woman’s long, gray skirt and the pinkish-orange sweater with orange buttons down the front. The last button was open because the woman’s stomach was a little bit fat. The woman, who was surely her grandmother, held a cane topped with a carved cat’s head. The feline’s yellow stone eyes peered out from between the woman’s curving fingers.

Willow pushed at the dog, keeping her hand clear of its mouth, and watched the woman who stood in Papa’s arms. She fit under his chin. “It’s all right,” she heard the woman say, her voice against Papa’s chest. “It’s time you came home.”

I let myself dwell a moment on the words:
It’s all right
and
home.
Would that ever be true again? If only I could have taken her into my arms, too. Luessy, my niece, my daughter.

Neither Luessy, nor Julian, paid attention to how the dog tried to salve Willow’s sore cheek with its tongue. She pushed at the animal again. “Go away.”

“Friar,” Luessy commanded. The dog stepped to her side and sat back on its haunches. She patted its coppery head, “You’ve found us a little girl.”

The dog yapped as if speaking, and Willow believed the animal was lying, claiming it
had
found her. She kept tight against Julian’s leg. “Papa brought me in his car.”

Luessy pointed. “You came in that car?”

Pulling Willow in front of him, Julian planted his hands on her shoulders. “You remember your grandmother.”

“I see my dreams are true,” Luessy said, her eyes filling with tears.

“No, Ma,” Julian stopped her. “Willow’s got to live in this world.” His finger stabbed the air, pointing down at the porch floor. “She’s got to live in this world right here.” They’d had the same argument before, but when he spoke again, his voice was softer. “Here. Not in a world based on dreams and superstitions.”

She remained as calm as the braid over her shoulder. “Your ancestors aren’t gone just because you’ve quit believing in them. You think I don’t know who she is?”

“The dead
are
gone.”

Luessy shrugged at Julian and bent to Willow. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s just a couple of scratches,” he said.

Willow’s mind flashed back to the fall, her chin striking the floor, the pain and the familiar smell of wax polish and then to the previous night when she also smelled floor wax. Papa had tucked her into bed, and after a few minutes, when she was sure he wasn’t coming back to kiss her again, she crawled onto the floor to sleep. There, she stared at the shadowy ceiling, her eyes finally closing and her mind drifting. Papa was there in her twilight sleep, walking back and forth at the foot of his bed, his face sad. He stopped, finally, his long legs folding like a grasshopper’s as he sank onto the small tapestry-covered stool in front of Jeannie’s vanity. His straight back bent forward, and he lifted Jeannie’s hairbrush, rubbing a thumb over the bristles, flattening them and letting them spring back one by one. He cried. A sound so quiet Willow needed to look hard at his trembling shoulders to be sure.

Standing on the porch now, she knew he shouldn’t leave her, and he shouldn’t always be thinking about Jeannie. “My blood was in the sink,” she said to Luessy, “and all over the towel.”

Julian chuckled. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad.”

“It was,” she insisted. He’d leave her now with the strange old woman whose dreams and visions he didn’t like. While she stayed, he’d go back to Omaha to be with the pictures of
dead
Jeannie on his bedroom walls. Willow hated them. They smiled at Papa from behind cold glass but never at her. The pictures, like the other things Jeannie left behind—as if she’d only gone to the store and would be right back—her hand mirror, lipstick, nail polish, perfumes, hairbrush, all stole Papa away.

“It looks like you’ll heal just fine,” Luessy said of the cuts. “Will you call me Mémé?”

My Luessy, or
Mémé,
French for grandmother, was an old woman now and still in her functional clothes—something I never could break her of. Her wrinkled skin reminded Willow of the Catechism she covered with a brown grocery sack in September and carried and crushed and stuffed into her bag until school ended just days before. She also saw sparkle in her mémé’s eyes, as though another kid played hide-and-seek from behind the wrinkles.

“Come,” Luessy said to Julian, “say ‘hello,’ to your sister. Have a cup of tea with us.”

With his hands still on Willow’s shoulders, he stiffened. Couldn’t they just chat for a minute on the porch? “You and Tory getting along these days?”

“I have my work, and,” she suppressed a wry smile, “Tory has hers.”

Julian chuckled again, “I’m sure her dolls make a lot of little girls happy.”

Luessy’s expression changed. “Any news I can give Jonah?”

“No,” Julian said, needing another cigarette. “I wish I had something.”

“Well, come along.”

“Not today.” What to say? “They’re expecting me at the station.”

Willow’s heart kicked. She tucked Doll between her knees and not caring about her smaller hand, reached up with both, filling her fists with Julian’s thick fingers. She stared hard at the
Jeannie
bag he’d set on the porch floor, willing
that
Jeannie to make him change his mind. “You’re going to stay with me aren’t you, Papa?”

Luessy studied her son. Her liver-spotted hand clutched and unclutched the cat’s head on top of her cane. “Jeannie’s not in there. It’s just the house where your mother and sister live.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and was sorry for things he couldn’t name. “We’ll talk tomorrow, when I pick her up.”

“I’m sure you’re the best the precinct has, but a man needs more than his work. Even when he wins awards.”

“Aren’t you the one always writing?” he asked. “Wrestling with plots and motives? Remember how you used to drill Tory and me on the criminal mind and red herrings? How many mysteries now? Two dozen?”

Luessy’s emerald eyes sparkled. “I need to keep busy,” she said, “but what
you
need is a lady.”

One hand slipped from Willow’s grasp, and he dropped it on her head like a heavy, too-large cap. “Here is my lady.” He hesitated, “Willow doesn’t know you. She’s likely to get homesick and —”

Raising a curved finger, Luessy stopped him. “She needs to learn who she is. No one owns a child. She belongs to the family, to all the ancestors responsible for her being here.”

Though she didn’t fully understand the words, Willow understood enough to frown. She and Papa were a whole family. No one else could be in it.

His hand slid off her head, down over her shoulder, and halfway to her elbow. He pulled her up against him, the hug lifting her onto her toes. He reached, hugged his mother, and started down the steps.

“Papa!” Her scream struck his back. She saw the flinch of his shoulders beneath his shirt, but then he hurried even faster. She screamed again, but he went around the front of the car and opened the door. She started after him, but Luessy bent over her, and the cat-head cane landed thick and sure as a post on the white porch floor, smack between her Keds. The movement excited Friar, and he jumped up and came around to help block Willow’s way, licking her face as if Luessy had given the command.

By the time Willow squirmed away, Papa’s car was rolling into the shady tunnel of trees, light and shadow sliding over the top and trunk, leaving her at the place that made him run away.

Luessy tapped her cane to the edge of the porch. She watched the car leave the drive, turn back onto Old Squaw Road, and vanish around the curve. “He’s still in pain,” she said. “Losing your mother weighs on him.” Her eyes remained on the empty drive. “Jeannie turned bad so quickly, and there was nothing he could do to save her. He believed he could protect a city, but he failed to save his wife. It’s blaming himself that won’t let him heal.” She forced herself to turn back and smile. “My moons dried up so long ago, it’s hard to believe that man came from my body. I remember being stretched like a pear though, my skin too tight instead of too loose.”

Willow knew no one had moons, dried up or not. She quit pushing at Friar, and the dog stood at her side, wagging his tail back and forth. “I don’t want to stay here,” she said.

“It’s time you were back. I didn’t go through all the pain of squeezing out two wet seals not to have one of them give me a grandchild. You and I need time while I’m still here.” She rapped the tip of her cane on the porch floor. “In this world.” She started down the stairs Julian just descended. “Come and see how our flowers are doing.”

Doll smelled of Papa’s cigarettes, and Willow stood unmoving, inhaling the scent. Mémé didn’t match anything, but Friar was nice. His tail never stopped wagging, and his breath smelled stinky. She’d tell Mary Wolfe because Mary didn’t have a dog. Maybe, Mary didn’t even have a grandmother with a cat cane and twinkling eyes and a long braid hanging over her shoulder. Willow frowned, not wanting to think of good things. She hadn’t agreed to stay.

Luessy reached the bottom stair. “You and I are old family. In time, you’ll understand the circle doesn’t break.”

Goose bumps peppered Willow’s arms. Mémé’s orange sweater stretched over her back. A misshapen back, a bumpy back, not flat like on pretty people. “You should get fixed.”

A large smile broke across Luessy’s face, widening her lips and showing her old teeth. “I’ve become a crone, haven’t I?”

Willow had meant to be a little bit mean, but Mémé’s smile was so big she didn’t need to be fixed. In Willow’s mind, Mémé knew a secret about being broken that made it all right. Watching her, Willow felt as if she almost knew the secret, too. She let the fingertips of her right hand peek out from her sweater cuff. Then more. With her whole hand out, and Mémé still smiling, her mouth not going into an
O
, Willow started down the steps. At the bottom, she offered the weaker hand to Mémé. The two of them almost matched.

7

They moved at Luessy’s relishing pace around the corner and alongside the manor. With each step gained, I felt myself growing heavier, but Luessy was happy and used her cane to point: “Boxwood hedges, George Tabor Azaleas, peonies, Damask roses.”

To Willow, who wasn’t listening to the plant names, Mémé smelled something like the powder and perfumes still on Jeannie’s dresser. This made Mémé almost a match to all the things Willow wanted when she closed her eyes in the dark, or snuck into Papa’s room and licked the glass over Jeannie’s pictures and tried to taste her.

“After all these years,” Luessy said, “you’ll need new paints.”

Before Willow could ask if Mémé really was going to buy her paints, Mémé stopped and looked upward. The corners of her mouth turned down. Willow frowned, too.

Standing on a second-story porch was a skinny woman with thin folded arms. Her nose and eyes resembled Papa’s, but Papa smiled at people, and his black hair wasn’t pulled back as tight as a swim cap.

Luessy tugged Willow’s hand. “Come on, don’t mind her.”

They’d gone only a few feet when Willow glanced back, hoping that this time she’d see the woman smiling. The porch was empty. The woman had vanished as if she’d never been.

“Your aunt,” Luessy said. “She doesn’t go by Victoria now. She’s chopped off her name like a goddess her hair. She’s
Tory
. Just the butt end of a beautiful name.”

“My name is a tree.”

“Yes, I remember. I’ll show you the tree. I’m glad your father settled on Willow and left off the ‘weeping.’ I think he’s keeping that part for himself.” The thought of Julian’s unhappiness tightened her chest. “It takes time, still, by now.”

“That lady doesn’t like me.”

“She doesn’t know who you are. She’s angry with me, though she stays right here. Same as the child’s handprints she pressed into the walk decades ago.”

Luessy bent, pulled a small weed in their path, and rubbed the dirt from her fingers on her skirt. “I don’t know what went wrong,” she continued. “I think both my children are dragging around bones. Tory is waiting to inherit this place, but those old handprints aren’t a hold on a piece of land. Not like birth string.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t mind me. I was remembering the night you were born, that’s all. Stars roaring so bright I could barely tolerate the noise. Birth and death mixed up. Nothing solid, and those stars.”

Willow knew she’d eventually have to go inside the house, and when she did, the skinny woman would be there. For comfort, she reached out and touched Friar whenever his back and forth trotting brought him close enough. She also let her eyes take sidelong glances at Mémé’s back and the bump larger than her own. “How come you look like that?”

“Life grows a woman down. One day, she’s as bowed as a spent flower. Not to worry though, that’s when she’s strongest. She loves mightily, and she creates. She’s alive here,” Luessy’s finger touched her forehead and then tapped her wool sweater over her heart, “and here. When a body curls, a woman knows it’s time to start making plans, giving away her things.”

“Why?”

“She needs the space to journey
inside
. The clutter’s too cumbersome.”

Willow pressed her lips together. Her mouth wanted to tell Mémé she talked funny, but the issue of Mémé’s back was more important. “How come a doctor can’t fix you?”

“There’s no hocus pocus for old age; I don’t need to be fixed.” Her eyes narrowed. “Your father isn’t still hunting doctors for you?”

“They can’t fix me.”

They reached knee-high lavender growing wide and round alongside the flagstone path. The swish of Luessy’s skirt against the small, dusty-green stems and leaves sent perfume into the air. “Our bodies are memory,” Luessy said. “Unfinished work. Your back is what’s right with you. And mine? Well, by the time you’ve reached my age, you’ll have seen such a world of sorrow and nonsense you’ll know you’re something just for staying. A dowager’s hump means I’ve been blessed with a long life. I’m proud of that.” She paused, “Besides, one person looks silly as the next. I don’t care how beautiful they suppose they are.”

“Do I have a dowager’s hump?”

“No. Yours is so special that it came with you. You didn’t need to earn it.”

They finished rounding the house. Three acres of manicured grounds, flowering trees in pink, white, and lavender, and a host of ground color, widened Willow’s eyes. “Our house has yellow dandy, um, lions,” she said.

The cat cane swung again, moving left to right in the air. “Magnolias, lilacs, tulips, jonquils, peonies, bleeding hearts.” The cane stopped. “That tree there is your tree.”

She led Willow to the far side of the yard, rather than into the garden. They looked down a long and steep hillside covered in clover, wild phlox, Dutchman’s breeches, and Bloodroot. Bees hummed over the acres. The plunge of wild and unfarmable land ended at a field with green shoots of corn just breaking ground. Beyond that ran the same band of trees I remembered so well. The shiny belt of the Elkhorn River running through them. Still farther was the squat settlement of Greenburr: one street of businesses, skirted by a compact grid of square blocks holding both small homes and one-hundred-year old stately mansions.

“It’s beggarly to never know land,” Luessy said. “I’ve lived on this hill all my life. I know its shape, sound, and what the trees want. I know the path the wind takes coming up here and how that changes with the seasons.” As if conjured, a sudden breeze blew over Luessy’s face, and she breathed deep. “A person must take root and commit to staying before the spirit of the land speaks to him.”

Willow listened less to Luessy’s actual words than to their tone and numbers. Mémé talked funny and constantly, not a match to Papa.

Turning from the slope, Luessy nodded in the direction of an old and crumbling foundation with plugs of thick-growing grass studding the cracks, the remains of Peu de Nid. The chiseled rocks, the size of kitchen kettles, were still stained black by the sweeps of flame that ravaged it so many years before. Though the home had been rugged and cold in the winter and Thomas dead many years, I still refused to leave it and move across the yard to live with Luessy. Until the fire.

“Do you remember that small house?” Luessy asked. When Willow shrugged, ‘no,’ Luessy continued, “My uncle built the place for my aunt, Amelie-Anais. He’d traveled to Europe and met her in France.” There was still no reaction from Willow. “She eventually learned English, but for a long time her speech was halting. When she went down the hill to shop, a few folks there—only second-generation immigrants themselves—snickered over her accent and sparse vocabulary. They liked to ask each time where she lived. She must have thought them fools for never remembering, but she was a lady. She’d point up here over and over and tell them again, ‘Farthest house.’ The town began referring to her place by that name. They called the road coming up here ‘Old Squaw Road’ because of the Indian women who came to Amelie for help.”

“Real Indians were here?”

“At times. Much of my uncle’s work was with the Omaha Tribe. They trusted him, and the women came to trust my aunt.”

Willow had no interest in the ruined foundation, but she stared at the waist-high stack of grave rocks where I unknowingly drifted. I hadn’t meant to settle on the gravestones, and I never expected I’d taken on such weight that she could see me. She pointed. “Who’s that?”

“Do you mean the crosses? My aunt and uncle are buried there.” It wasn’t what Willow had asked, but the child’s comment was unnerving. Luessy scolded herself. What was she doing? Trying to force Willow to remember things she shouldn’t be remembering? “It’s a good thing your father isn’t here,” she said. “He’d have plenty to say about my carrying on.” She took Willow’s hand again and steered her in the opposite direction. “See those white boxes? Jonah’s tending his bees. He’s anxious to meet you.”

Turning from the stones was hard for Willow, but Luessy insisted. “Don’t get too close to the hives, not until we’re sure the bees know you.” Her voice lifted, “Jonah! Willow is here.”

Seeing Jonah eased some of my pain, if not my guilt. He’d survived the years and still lived at Farthest House, though I knew living was not thriving.

He stepped from the shadows between the four columns of stacked white boxes: four hives, each three crates high. Willow saw a small man with skin the same black/brown of Friar’s eyes. He held a dented and rusty smoker and wore bib overalls with two faded shirts beneath.
Old too,
Willow thought, a
match to Mémé.
At his temples, gray wooly hair sprang from beneath a fraying straw hat, the hair sparkling in the sunlight. As they started for him, he set down the smoker and started for them. Willow marveled at the droop of his eyes; the outside corners had slid down, closing his eyes by half. The skin beneath his eyes, pads thick as thumbs, sagged. Her stomach danced as it did whenever she found new picture books in the library: flying carpets, Babar going to the circus, cows sneezing, and Jack climbing a bean stalk straight into a giant’s house. Mémé’s place, too, was full of magic.

“Here’s Willow,” Luessy said.

Willow heard the pride riding the tops of her grandmother’s words, and she wanted to speak for herself. “My name comes from a tree.”

Jonah removed his hat and wiped his forehead with the cuff of his shirt. “My name is Bug, and that’s because of a bug.”

She stared. His face was geography.

“Wasn’t no bigger than you,” he said. “Oh, was it a hot day at my colored school.” He nodded slowly, as if the memory rolled toward him from a distance and needed waiting on. “A brown roach crawled outta my sleeve. It was a bad morning already, my clothes stinking something awful and nobody wanting near me. Seemed to me that I walked alone in the world. Then, here come that bug right smack out onto the plank table. The only thing willing to get close to me. I stared at them two little feelers on his head just a twitchin’, him trying to figure out where to hide. That bug had crawled up and down my arm without my even knowin’. I owed it something for not minding me and my black skin, and I hurt so bad with loneliness, I wanted him back in my clothes.”

Luessy listened quietly, giving Jonah’s story its time.

He leaned closer, and Willow closer to him. “I was considering on that,” he continued, “when a little girl about your size, sitting way down at the end, a pretty thing I’d set my eyes on, started crying and pointing at my bug. You’d a thought the feller a ten-foot rattler. Teacher locked me the whole afternoon in the outhouse. Said I smelled like I belonged there.” Jonah waited again on the story, glancing from Luessy back to Willow. “Once that door closed, ah, the stink and heat in there, I’d like to have fainted straight into the privy. Spiders and beetles black as me come out after a bit, covering the floor and wanting on my bare feet. Dancing was no good lest I wanted them under instead of over. I was too mean to scream. I had to get my mind around them bugs, tell myself they liked me, and there was no difference between us.” He nodded toward the hives, “I guess that’s stayed with me.”

He put his hat back on. “That was my last day of school. When teacher let me out, I ran all the way to the shack where I’d been holing up by myself. I never went back. Still, I’d gotten the name Bug, and it followed me to the streets. Caused me many a black eye and bloody nose before I figured if I was goin’ lose all the fights, I was too runty a fellow to mind name calling.”

When he finished, Willow told a story about herself. “Jeannie died.”

Luessy’s eyes widened, but Jonah’s continued to droop. “Yup. That’s a fact,” he said.

The two had said a lot to each other. They were friends now, Willow believed, even if she couldn’t say exactly how. “Do the bees sting you?”

“It’s me steals their honey, and a sting’s good medicine for what ails you.”

“If I was a bee,” she whispered, her eyes lowering to the neat patches on the knees of his pants, “I wouldn’t ever sting you.”

“Yup. I wouldn’t ever sting you either.”

Luessy and Jonah began talking roses, and Willow snuck a peek back to where I sat. “A lady is there.”

The two adults glanced in the direction of her pointing. Seeing she indicated the graves, Jonah took a small, but quick step back. “Best be finishing my work.” The last thing he wanted, and with good reason, was a child able to see the buried dead.